On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 2:02 PM, Steve Fink <sf...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> The ignorance itself doesn't help, sure. But I still assert that there are > benefits to having fewer things in your head, to have your focus wholly > consumed by a more limited scope for the most part. I'm skeptical that there are any advantages to having that sort of focus. Think of all the stuff we have to know just to be platform developers: C++; OS-level stuff like paging, syscalls, and threadings; computer architecture and assembly code; Unix and Windows APIs; compilers, profilers, the command line, emacs or vi, and probably other stuff I've forgotten. Any "specialist" already has to know a ton of things that aren't directly related to the code they're writing. Is it really that taxing to one's brain to also know the basics of XUL, XBL, and JS programming, for example? > It's not for everybody, but imagine if we suddenly needed to hire a > Sparc64 expert and we made it part of our hiring criteria that they had to > be willing to chase bugs through CSS code if they happened to be triggered > by their work. We would drastically limit our hiring options, cutting out > some very qualified people. Sure, we would have trouble hiring someone like that. It's not very likely that anyone has worked on those two things. But there's no reason people can't learn on the job. > (Or say we didn't factor that into account when hiring, but then expected > it of them when they started working. I would imagine that would feel > pretty unfair and frustrating.) Requiring someone to do something they don't want to do isn't going to be successful. Instead, I would like to find ways to encourage people to branch out willingly. Some people won't be interested; I guess that's fine. The points I'd like to make are: - As a developer, you'll get more exposure and respect if you touch more parts of the code. You'll also be more productive, which probably will make you happier. - It's strictly to Mozilla's benefit. I think it would be a very rare case where Mozilla was hurt because irrelevant parts of the codebase were taking up too much space in a developer's brain. Also, Steve, all the stuff you do related to custom SM builds and static analysis is awesome. I'm just trying to say that we need more of that sort of thing. -Bill _______________________________________________ dev-tech-js-engine-internals mailing list dev-tech-js-engine-internals@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-internals
